Kill Decision(51)

“You know they like to wreck things. I can’t keep windshield wipers on the trucks when they get bored. Besides, I thought your ‘hunter-killer’ could look after itself.”

“It’s idiocy having these birds flying around down here. They steal chips and components.”

Foxy and Singleton both turned to see McKinney. Foxy nodded. “Morning.”

“Morning.” McKinney looked down to see the ravens flapping their wings, cawing loudly as Singleton tried to move in to salvage his machine.

Foxy thumbed down the hall. “Team room’s that way. You’ll find breakfast there.”

“Thanks.” McKinney nodded and stepped past, trying to stifle a shared grin with Foxy as the birds snapped at Singleton’s fingers. He tried to shoo them away.

Like the rest of the underground offices the brightly lit team room was new enough that it still smelled of fresh paint. However, it didn’t have a drop ceiling; instead exposed limestone stood three times McKinney’s height above. The scoured and striated rock was painted white and crisscrossed by fire sprinkler pipes and bright fluorescent work lights. The work area was huge. A dozen people in jeans and variously colored Ancile Services polo shirts sat around a series of large tables that had been pushed together to create a broad and long work surface littered with thousands of documents, photographs, and blueprints, as well as machine-milled foam models of what appeared to be unmanned aircraft and machine parts. There were also diagrams of corporate and residential buildings detailing explosive damage, dotted with callouts and captions unreadable at this distance. A dozen identical laptops were open and running with people clicking away at keyboards. Half a dozen more people sat or stood at tables running along the room’s perimeter. The walls were hung with large plotter-printed diagrams, maps, and blueprints depicting the United States, maps of commercial flight paths, radar and military installations, and printouts of surveillance imagery. There were also silhouettes of hundreds of drone aircraft pinned to the walls—way more, in fact, than McKinney had known existed. The silhouettes were categorized by country: Argentina, Bulgaria, China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, India, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Pakistan, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey, the UK, the U.S.—and on, and on. There were hundreds of drones on the walls.

Clearly thousands of man-hours had already been expended on this project, and everyone seemed to be busy working their portion of it.

Odin stood at the head of the table with his arms crossed. He nodded silently to her as she examined the team room.

Among the other team members it was impossible to tell who was military and who was civilian. Long hair and beards certainly didn’t indicate a civilian background, since Odin and Foxy had both.

There was a plump forty-something Asian man—Korean, she guessed—conversing with a lanky blond guy who, although boyish, was probably in his thirties. She exchanged nods with him as she laid her assigned laptop on the table and took an open seat. There was lots of room.

Glancing along the table she saw a pear-shaped African-American man in his thirties gesturing to a laptop screen, while another Asian man listened in, slighter in build and more fair-complexioned—most likely Japanese. The Japanese man gave McKinney a knowing, sympathetic nod. Two other individuals at the edge of the room—a Caucasian man and a Latina in their early twenties—were arguing about something involving radio signals. A collection of computers and signal processing equipment lined their workstation.

The last team member at the table, a sophisticated-looking African-American woman in her late twenties or early thirties, with short hair, smiled in greeting. Her eyeglasses went way beyond functional into stylish-expensive territory. “Have you had breakfast yet? There’s food just beyond the pillar.”

McKinney shook her head. “No, I’m fine, thanks. Not much of an appetite.”

A series of clocks on one wall showed the time in a dozen cities of the world. It was nearly seven A.M. local time.

“So, what is this, mission control?”

The woman nodded. “Joint operations center—the JOC. People from different disciplines and commands under Odin’s op-con.” On McKinney’s squint she added, “Sorry. Military speak. It means ‘operational control.’ He’s in charge here.”

“He made that pretty clear.”

She smiled sympathetically. “They pick assertive types to head these missions.” She reached across to extend her hand. “I’m Snowcap, team psychologist.”

McKinney shook the woman’s hand. “Surprised to see a psychologist here.”